April 17 – June 29, 2025
Curated by Joanne Junga Yang
The New Horizons: Korean Contemporary Photography exhibition will introduce the creative and diverse works of established Korean photographers to American audiences.
Curated by Joanne Junga Yang, this exhibition in our Main Gallery showcases the captivating works of seven contemporary Korean photographers: Ok Hyun Ahn, Seongyoun Koo, Anna Lim, Soosik Lim, Hyundoo Park, Jiyeon Sung and Sun Hi Zo, Their diverse portfolios delve into the intricate tapestry of human emotions, exploring themes of longing, loss, and the nuanced ways in which individuals navigate their cultural identities.
Read more from Joanne Junga Yang‘s curatorial statement here.
Korean photography has developed through a dynamic balance between documentation and artistic expression, serving as both a means of recording reality and a tool for creative interpretation. While traditional documentary photography has captured social and historical transformations, contemporary photographers explore new possibilities by expanding the boundaries of the medium. Through this evolution, Korean photography has developed a distinct visual language that reflects the ongoing changes in society and culture.
<New Horizons: Korean Contemporary Photography> introduces seven photographers who reinterpret reality through their images, responding to the world around them and creating new narratives. This exhibition highlights how Korean contemporary photography engages with global artistic trends while maintaining its unique perspective. These artists, who have witnessed the transition from analog to digital photography, continue to experiment with the medium’s potential. Their works go beyond simple representation, using photography to question, redefine, and expand how we perceive the world.
Ok Hyun Ahn
Ok Hyun Ahn lives and works in Seoul. She earned her MFA in Photography, Video, and Related Media, at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She was awarded the Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) Fellowship at the Bronx Museum, New York (2012), and has had residencies in the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), New York (2010), and the Ssamzie Studio Program, Seoul (2007). Her numerous solo exhibitions include Dictee x Love Poem, Daejeon Museum of Art (2023), Love, Tears, Seduction, Lydmar Hotel, Stockholm (2015), and Homo Sentimentalis, SHOW ROOM, NYC (2013). Her work was presented at 12th Gwangju Biennale, 2018 and others. Her work has been collected by the Seoul Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Busan, the Daejeon Museum of Art, and the Photographic Center Northwest, Seattle.
Working primarily in photography and video, she not only explores the complex aspects of human emotions but also exposes the banal layers underneath consciousness to be absurd.
Jiyeon Sung
Jiyeon Sung is a contemporary photographer known for her staged photography, which reinterprets everyday scenes in a minimalist way using mise-en-scène elements inspired by theater sets. By placing simple yet symbolic objects and figures, her work visualizes the inner world of modern individuals and explores existential questions. The moments she captures are not frozen in death but suspended in continuous time.
After studying French literature in Korea, she earned a Master’s degree in Photography and Contemporary Art from the University of Paris VIII. In 2006, she received the Promising Artist Award from the Korean Cultural Center in France, and in 2016, she was awarded the 14th Daum Artist Award by the Parkgeonhi Foundation in Korea. Her works are included in the collections of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art – Art Bank, Seoul Museum of Art, Busan Museum of Art, Hanmi Museum of Photography, GoEun Museum of Photography, Société Générale Bank in France, and FRAC Haute-Normandie, among others.
Seongyoun Koo
Seongyoun Koo is a South Korean photographer who challenges conventional perceptions of objects through her still-life photography. By placing unexpected materials in unconventional settings or creating compositions that mimic natural forms, she playfully subverts the inherent meanings and values we attach to everyday things. Her major series include Butterflies (2000), Sand (2004), Flower Pots (2005), Popcorn (2007), Candy (2009–), and Sugar (2015–).
Her work explores how simple contextual shifts can radically alter an object’s meaning. In her Flowers and Butterflies series, she demonstrates how a beautiful butterfly, when placed on a bowl of rice instead of a flower, suddenly becomes an inedible insect. This playful yet critical approach continues in Flower Pots, where she stages scenes of ornamental plants invading human spaces, offering a satirical commentary on humanity’s tendency to view nature as something to control and conquer. Koo later transitioned to constructing artificial landscapes by hand, blurring the line between reality and representation. In Popcorn, she uses popped kernels to recreate delicate plum blossoms, emphasizing their fleeting beauty. In Candy, she meticulously crafts peony flowers—symbols of wishes and prosperity—out of colorful sweets, merging themes of desire and impermanence. In Sugar, she molds decorative objects from sugar, allowing them to melt over time, reflecting on the ephemerality of existence and the fragility of value. Her work often plays with material illusion, where ephemeral substances—whether sugar, candy, or popcorn—are transformed into something visually substantial yet fundamentally transient. The melting sugar sculptures, in particular, resonate as a poetic meditation on time, memory, and the impermanence of human constructs.
Seongyoun Koo lives and works in Seoul, South Korea. She holds a B.A. in Indian Philosophy from Dongguk University (1994) and a B.F.A. in Photography from Seoul Institute of the Arts (1997).
Anna Lim
Anna Lim was born and live in Seoul. She graduated MA from California State University, Fullerton in 1996 and received PhD in Art Photography from from Hongik University in Korea in 2019.
She has won the award the 11th ILWOO Photography Award, Seoul (2020), the Arles Photo Portfolio Review Award (2019), Korean Artist Project Artists (2017), SOORIM Photography Cultural Award (2014), Raising Female Artist Award (2013), Sovereign Art Foundation Asia 30 Artists (2012), Public Art 4070 Project Artist of the Year (2012), New York Gallery Korea Young Artist of the Year (1999). Furthermore, she has held 20 individual exhibitions and more than 50 group exhibitions at home and abroad and has been working steadily so far. In the recent series of works, Anxiety; Weight transferred to images (2022), Anxiety ON/OFF (2020), Anxiety rehearsal (2018), Frozen Hero (2017), Reconstruction of Climax (2011), she visualizes a meta-fictional narrative self-reflective perspective on mass media that distributes images of war weapons and other people’s pain as spectacles, and the viewer who consumes them.
She is currently a professor in the Department of Photography and Media at Sangmyung University in Korea.
Soosik Lim
Soosik Lim graduated from Chung-ang University’s Department of Photography and the graduate school of the same university. He expresses various objects that symbolize universal desire using photography through series of works such as Chaekgado (which combined photos of bookshelves with the way in which to create Korean traditional paintings), Picturenary, Mountain, and Room.K. Lim has participated in over 100 group exhibitions and 20 solo exhibitions in many countries, including the U.K., Spain, and Brazil. His works are housed at several museums, such as the Art Bank at Korea’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art and Germany’s Reiner Kunze Museum.
Hyundoo Park
Hyundoo Park studied photography at Chung-Ang University’s College of Arts in the early 2000s and later earned an M.F.A. in Photography and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Since then, he has been working on his ongoing series, Goodbye Stranger.
He has received the 8th Park Geon-hi Foundation Next Artist Award and the 1st Surim Cultural Foundation Surim Photography Award. He was also selected for major artist residencies, including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) Goyang Residency, the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) Nanji Residency, and the SeMA Exhibition Support Program. Through his work, Park explores the theme of existential alienation in modern society from various perspectives.
In addition to his artistic practice, he has taught photography at Korea National University of Arts, Chung-Ang University, and Hongik University, educating both university students and the general public.
Sun Hi Zo
Sun Hi Zo (b. 1971) explores loss, memory, and transformation through photography.
Her works, including Daisy; Cosmos Mea (2022) and Frozen Gaze (2020~), examine the boundaries of time, impermanence, and presence. Her Planet (2024~) series investigates material and temporal continuity, presenting decay as a continuous cycle of dissolution and renewal. Recently, she has been working on a desert-based project exploring invisibility and traces. Based in Seoul, she works globally and studied at Yonsei and Hongik University.
She is currently a professor at Kyungil University.
This exhibition is made possible by the generous financial support of the Griffin Directors Circle, Griffin Exhibition Committee and Advisory Council. Additional support from the Consulate General of the Republic of Korea and the Korean Cultural Society of Boston.
